California AG Bonta apologizes for agency’s role in Japanese internment during World War II

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — California Attorney General Rob Bonta issued a formal apology Thursday for his office’s role in the forced relocation and incarceration of more than 120,000 Japanese Americans in camps during World War II.

The apology comes more than three years after the California Legislature issued its own formal apology for the state’s role in the internment program, ordered by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1942. It was supported by Earl Warren, who served as state attorney general and governor during the three years the system was in place.

“Today, my office formally apologizes for its past use of legal tools to deprive a generation of Japanese Californians of their liberty and financial security during the World War II era,” Bonta said in a statement. “The forced relocation and incarceration of Japanese American citizens remains among the darkest periods of our history, and the suffering it caused Japanese American families across California is incalculable.”

Bonta added that while the horrors of the past can never be erased, “we must take steps to atone for past wrongs by answering the call for accountability, truth and reconciliation, racial healing and transformation.”

In 1943, then-Attorney General Robert Walker Kenny formed a unit to enforce the California Alien Land Law, which barred Asian immigrants from buying or leasing land until it was struck down by the California Supreme Court in 1952.

Then, in 1944, the attorney general’s office signed an amicus brief supporting the imprisonment of civil rights icon Fred Korematsu, despite the fact that he posed no security risk.

“The Attorney General’s Office recognizes today that this was unequivocally incorrect,” Bonta’s office said in a statement.

Thursday’s announcement comes on the 35th anniversary of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which granted reparations to many of the Japanese Americans who had been incarcerated during the war.